European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), Life History and Biography Network is pleased to announe;. The Annual Conference in 2019, with the theme Artful language and narratives of adult learning, will be held in Bergen, at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences from Thursday 28^th February to Sunday 3^rd March 2019. This is a Preliminary Call for Papers.

For 25 years since its first meeting in Geneva, ESREA’s Life History and Biography Network (LHBN) has been a forum for a wide range of researchers, including doctoral students, drawing on different disciplinary backgrounds, and coming from every corner of Europe, and beyond. Our conferences are based on the recognition and celebration of the diversity of methods, approaches and epistemologies in biographical research. And our aim is to create spaces for dialogue, reflexivity and discovery, in order to sustain trustful collaboration, publications and collaborative research projects.

 

The Conference theme: Artful Language and Narratives of Adult Learning

It is hard to imagine a narrative that is not made up from language and we recognise that the success of language is in its ability to construct meaningful, illuminating stories. Narratives that go beyond the syntactic rules of structure and formal grammar and engage and enliven the semantics and, maybe, the artfulness of being human. We want to explore the role of language in relation to being human and in adult learning, including its potential breadth and depth, and its possible artfulness in encompassing personal, social, professional and environmental struggles.

Language can provide a potentially safe and creative space from which to explore and to be playful, including to imagine what could yet be realised. Language allows us to move beyond or between the binaries of the internal/external, formal/informal, body/affect and to question what is real and to experience the struggle to know.

Language has a dark side, too: it can be reductive and used to disrupt the self and the other. It can be shaped by the coloniser and the powerful. It may be used to dominate individuals, societies, cultures, and at a global level for global corporations to manipulate, control and influence mass opinion and behaviour.

The politics of language can offer freedom or obfuscate and keep others ‘out’, including the languages of science, the academy and even extremist politics. There is violence as well as possibility inherent in our use of language.

The conference can question how language has emerged, evolved and died, in different contexts, (such as the language of popular or liberal education?) and what this may mean for adult learners. And how new languages of ‘learnification’ sustain the neoliberal agenda.

Language is a living thing that helps create families, societies, disciplines and popular movements. It can encompass the dialectic movement between one and another, between hope and despair, between understanding and denial. Language can identify us by our ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, or political leanings. Language can also fall short and fail to embrace the complexity and illusive quality of lived experience, including its spiritual dimensions. There is also language beyond words: in music, dance, image and artfulness.

Finally, we must learn many new languages, may be the language of social media and ‘likeable’ friends and distant dismissive Tweets. The variety of languages has to be attended to – learnt, if necessary. Languages can be sung, shouted and expressed through the body. There is also the language of silence, of being still, of being meditative which can allow new language to emerge. It is also through language that we can explore narratives of content and discontent.

In the context of the Network, language, and whose language is used, has been a constant issue. This includes what is lost in translation, or the inadequacy of someone else’s language to do justice to our own or others’ experience. And when we use language in our research and writing, who are we? Poets, scientists, novelists and or whatever; and who is it that we write about: what language or discursive regimes shape our encounters with the humanity of the other as well as ourselves? Is there a post-humanist language that can attune us more sensitively to the non-human world and the necessity of interdependence?

 

Who are we?

Convenors: Alan Bainbridge, Laura Formenti, Linden West

The Scientific Committee of our Conference and Reviewers of papers will be announced in due course

Members of the Scientific Committee will come from Italy, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom; all are committed to facilitate communication across the different languages, to create a learning inclusive community and to offer good critical space for early as well as expert researchers. The location of

Deadline for submission of abstracts for papers and proposals for symposia/workshops: 8^th October 2018

Abstracts (WORD format) should have no more than 500 words, Times New Roman, 12 points. The title of the abstract should be clear. Your name, institutional affiliation, phone and email should NOT be included in the abstract but be on a separate page.

Proposals for papers, symposia, workshops, or posters will be blind reviewed; acceptance will be announced by mid November 2018.

Final papers (3000 – 5000 words) should be submitted by 31st January 2019.

Detailed information will be made available later on the conference website.

 

Conference languages are English and French

ESREA's language policy is inclusive. Abstracts for the peer-review process may be in English or French. Papers and presentations will be welcome in French as well as English. Where possible, a short (1000-1500 word) summary in English should be provided.

For French, German, Italian speakers (and for all others): slides in English or bilingual are recommended. Professional translation is not provided during the conference, instead we will use the linguistic skills of colleagues to facilitate dialogue. Tolerance, respect, mutual support and curiosity will do the rest. It is important to notice that speakers requiring some element of translation or explanation must accept that they can say less in the allotted time: they should plan for this, perhaps by providing essential information in the form of a hand-out, for example.

 

For further information, please write to:

Dr Alan Bainbridge: ; [email protected]; Professor Laura Formenti: [email protected];
Professor Linden West: [email protected]; or Professor Jan-Kare Breivik:  [email protected]

Information on the Conference website will be provided after the summer: watch this space!

 

Professor Linden West PhD FRSA
Faculty of Education
Canterbury Christ Church University

Best Authentic Sneakers | Air Jordan